Governments in the 1990s

Contemporary Context:

The crisis and collapse of the Soviet Union brought forth two great surges
of democracy, the first in the fall of 1989 when the Communists surrendered
their monopoly of power in the satellite nations, and the second in the summer
of 1991 when the constituent republics of the Soviet Union seceded. There was
also a parallel surge of nationhood as four former
Communist unions -- the USSR, Czechoslovakia, Ethiopia and Yugoslavia --
shattered into 24 ethnic nations. [n.1]

All across the globe, the various petty tyrants who had stayed in power by
playing one side against the other in the Cold War were swept away. The
pro-Soviet among them were cast adrift, friendless and alone, while the
pro-Western soon realized that their former sponsors didn't need anti-Communist
thugs anymore. Throughout the Third World, strongmen agreed to relinquish their
power. They released opposition leaders from jail, scheduled elections and
pilfered national treasuries to set up retirement accounts in off-shore banks.

The end result was a world that has changed unrecognizeably from the world
twenty years earlier. In the early 1970s, democracies were scattered in a few
small clusters on the edges of the great land masses. By the late 1990s, four
continents (Europe, Australia and the Americas) were almost entirely democratic.
Africa had gone from almost entirely oppressive to only about half, and even if
some of the new "democracies" didn't quite have the hang of it and
occassionally continued to harass the opposition, reward cronies and fudge the
ballot counts, at least the jails were emptied of dissidents and the press was
allowed to complain more vocally about government abuses.

There is no single effect that the end of the Cold War had on hot war
worldwide. In Africa, several long smoldering civil wars fizzled out as
Soviet-sponsored governments and Western-sponsored guerrillas decided it was
time to talk. But this trend toward peace in one part of the world was balanced
by new conflicts elsewhere. In the former Communist lands of Eurasia, ethnic
hatreds which had been kept under control by Russian hegemony now found an
opportunity to flare up.